They died while defending Leningrad (St Petersburg) when it was under siege for more than 2 years in WW2

Volunteers who found the remains of 602 Soviet soldiers slaughtered by the Nazis give fighters proper burial The group discovered the skeletons on the bank of the River Neva, near St Petersburg during a voluntary dig Around 200,000 Soviet soldiers were killed there when the Nazis laid siege to Leningrad for 900 days in 1941.

Russia lost around 11 million soldiers in total and up to four million who have never been found. This has inspired younger generations of Russians to volunteer their spare time to searching for the missing fighters, with the hope of being able to give them a proper burial.

The Siege of Leningrad, was a prolonged military blockade undertaken mainly by the German Army Group North against Leningrad, historically and currently known as Saint Petersburg, in the Eastern Front theatre of World War II. The siege started on 8 September 1941, when the last road to the city was severed. Although the Soviets managed to open a narrow land corridor to the city on 18 January 1943, the siege was only lifted on 27 January 1944, 872 days after it began. It was one of the longest and most destructive sieges in history and possibly the costliest in terms of casualties.
--
When the German High Command considered how to destroy Leningrad, they ruled out occupying the city "because it would make us responsible for food supply". The resolution was to lay the city under siege and bombardment, starving its population "
---
The two-and-a-half year siege caused the greatest destruction and the largest loss of life ever known in a modern city. On Hitler's express orders, most of the palaces of the Tsars, such as the Catherine Palace, Peterhof Palace, Ropsha, Strelna, Gatchina, and other historic landmarks located outside the city's defensive perimeter were looted and then destroyed, with many art collections transported to Nazi Germany. A number of factories, schools, hospitals and other civil infrastructure were destroyed by air raids and long range artillery bombardment. .....

The 872 days of the siege caused extreme famine in the Leningrad region through disruption of utilities, water, energy and food supplies. This resulted in the deaths of up to 1,500,000 soldiers and civilians and the evacuation of 1,400,000 more, mainly women and children, many of whom died during evacuation due to starvation and bombardment. Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery alone in Leningrad holds half a million civilian victims of the siege. Economic destruction and human losses in Leningrad on both sides exceeded those of the Battle of Stalingrad, the Battle of Moscow, or the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The siege of Leningrad is the most lethal siege in world history, and some historians speak of the siege operations in terms of genocide, as a "racially motivated starvation policy" that became an integral part of the unprecedented German war of extermination against populations of the Soviet Union generally.

Lady Dai, more than 2000 years old and skin still soft to the touch

She died in 163 BC. When they found her in 1971, her hair was intact, her skin was soft to the touch, and her veins still housed type-A blood.

Now more than 2,000 years old, Xin Zhui, also known as Lady Dai, is a mummified woman of China’s Han dynasty (206 BC-220 AD) who still has her own hair, is soft to the touch, and has ligaments that still bend, much like a living person. She is widely recognized as the best-preserved human mummy in history.

Xin Zhui was discovered in 1971, when workers digging near an air raid shelter near Changsha practically stumbled across her massive tomb. Her funnel-like crypt contained more than 1,000 precious artifacts, including makeup, toiletries, hundreds of pieces of lacquerware, and 162 carved wooden figures which represented her staff of servants. A meal was even laid out to be enjoyed by Xin Zhui in the afterlife.

An array of additional ailments was also found throughout Xin Zhui’s body, including gallstones, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and liver disease. While examining her body, pathologists even found 138 undigested melon seeds in her stomach and intestines. As such seeds typically take one hour to digest, it was safe to assume that the melon was her last meal, eaten minutes before the heart attack that killed her.

Why did they bury the killer in the same grave as his victims in the first place?

The body of a deputy school principle who stabbed his wife and children to death has been exhumed so they will no longer have to share a grave with their killer. Alan Hawe took his own life after killing his schoolteacher wife Clodagh and their three children Liam, 13, Niall, 11, and Ryan, six, in County Cavan, Ireland in August. All five family members were then buried in a single grave in the cemetery at St Mary's Church, Castlerahan in September for around 250 days until the exhumation.

Mrs Hawe's sister Jacqueline Connolly and her mother Mary Coll said 'evil' Hawe was a 'wolf in sheep’s clothing' who 'fooled us all'. She added that the boys were 'pure, lovely, kind, talented, intelligent and wonderful' and their mother was 'their friend and protector, their guide, counsellor and teacher'.Mrs Hawe's family believe she had no idea she was in danger and had always protected the boys until Hawe carried out the murders. The family believe he carried out the killings 'to escape a fall from grace'.

The family have said they will now fight to raise awareness of 'silent' domestic violence, adding: 'We need to learn to recognize where dangers lie in the home, see how the desire for control can get out of control and act before it is too late.'

The things most likely to kill you in one infographic

Good infographics are amazing in the information they convey, especially about notoriously difficult subjects like assessing risk. Below are two that the UK's National Health Service put together in the Atlas of Risk via Business Insider

May 25, 2017

Elephants remember

Theunis Botha, 51, ran a professional hunting safari service that takes rich clients into the wilderness to kill large animals. According to the company’s website, it specializes in hunting leopards and lions with trained hounds.

On Friday afternoon, Botha was leading a hunt in Gwai, Zimbabwe, when they stumbled upon a herd of mating elephants. From the report: Three elephant cows stormed the hunters and Botha shot at them. A fourth cow stormed them from the side and one of the hunters shot her after she’d lifted Botha with her trunk. The shot was fatal and as the cow collapsed, she fell on Botha.

Though Botha specializes in leopards and lions, a wide variety of dead animals can be seen next to smiling rich men in memento photos on the company’s website. Several show Botha standing beside enormous trophy elephants

May 10, 2017

More bizarre deaths

Part of an intermittent series, these short snippets of untimely and unexpected deaths can not begin to hint at the grief and loss their families and friends will experience for years to come. May their memory be a blessing. May they all Rest in Peace and perpetual light shine upon them.

Grace McDermott, 26, a PhD researcher at Dublin City University, was visiting some friends in Limerick for the weekend. There were four other people in the house with her, three men and another woman, who all escaped uninjured, and were the ones who notified authorities.

Carolyn Williams-Cottier, 26, mother of two small children, and Trevor Roth, 30, father of three children, had no way of knowing what was happening because carbon monoxide is colorless and odorless, police said.

He slipped and fell some 3,000 ft, severing his body into bits and pieces, said expedition organizers. One of the most-renowned mountaineers of his generation, Steck said, before he set off on his expedition, 'I think being in the mountains is the best thing in life. Once you are out you are free and can do what you like to do.'

The MIT graduate died while trying to climb his alma mater's iconic 150ft-high dome. Nicholas Paggi, 24, died after he climbed the roof near the dome and slipped off. The 2015 graduate of the top global university was climbing the dome as a fun sort of prank, said his mother. He was working as a software engineer and had graduated with degrees in computer science and engineering, and physics, the school's newspaper The Tech reports. Doctor Rich Fletcher told CBS: 'He was one of the greatest computer programmers I've worked with.' He added: 'He was a great mentor to all students. It's such a loss to all of us.'

Adrien Dubosc, 30, died off the French island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean just two months after one of his best friends died in almost identical circumstances. Mr Dubosc was a member of Shark Watch Patrol, an organization dedicated to cutting down on shark deaths on Reunion, which is plagued by man-eating bull and tiger sharks. Despite this, he loved the fish, and regularly posted Facebook pictures of ones he had seen, together with biological details about them.

Jose Claudio Pol charged with murder after patient died from heart attack. He ordered council worker to remove the only cylinder from town's health centre. Photos emerged of him using oxygen cylinder as a beer keg at New Year's party. A technical report found that his actions led to the death of the patient.

Boy and girl, both 17, were leaving a luxury block of flats in Salamanca. The young couple were on their way to a party to celebrate the end of exams. It is believed either the floor or a wall of a lift gave way.

Luis Campos, of California, was sucker-punched on Fremont Street in Las Vegas Sunday and died from his injuries in the hospital three days later. Campos was in town to attend his brother's bachelor party; he was supposed to be the best man in the wedding. The father-of-five was waiting with his other brother to get into a lounge when two men came up to him and one struck him in the face before fleeing. Las Vegas police on Thursday released CCTV video showing the pair, Hispanic men in their 20s, running away from the scene.

May 8, 2017

Operation Identifcation

That’s 6,023 recorded deaths in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California, compared to a combined 4,800 between 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina.....“I would say for every one we find, we’re probably missing five,” the local sheriff said.

Operation Identification is now trying to give the issue a more human face.

“When we get them, we assign them a case number because we have to have a way of tracking cases, but no one deserves to be just a number,” Timonthy P. Gocha, a forensic anthropologist with the project told The New York Times. “The idea is to figure out who they are, and give them their name back.”

212 bodies and more than 2,000 objects belonging to U.S.-Mexico border crossers sit in a collection at the Texas State University morgue. There are baseball caps and Bibles, bracelets and stuffed animals — treasures that reminded their owners of the loved ones that they had left behind.

It’s a big project; there are a lot of bodies.

Most of the immigrants died from dehydration, heatstroke, or hypothermia. The Trump administration’s approach to illegal border crossings does seem to have deterred some potential migrants. Arrests at the border have declined sharply from 40,000 a month at the end of 2016, to just 12,193 in March.

That tiny Alderney — less than four miles long and a mile-and-a-half wide — was the site of slave labour camps during the war has been recognised for decades. But the scale of the operation and the number of deaths there have always been played down. After years of research, we are now in a position to reveal the grimmest truths.

The numbers who died there in helping Hitler and his henchmen pursue their evil master-plan were not the few hundreds spoken of in semi-official sources and history books. In fact, tens of thousands lost their lives in the most brutal way — at least 40,000 by our calculations and possibly many, many more. Such a toll makes Alderney nothing less than the biggest crime scene in British history.

The project on which they were engaged was not just the massive defensive works — the fortifications, bunkers, block-houses and anti-tank walls built all over the island on Hitler’s express orders to forestall an Allied invasion. There was a deadly offensive capability, too, never previously known. We have uncovered incontrovertible evidence that a top-secret launcher site for V1 missiles — one of Hitler’s vengeance weapons — was being constructed on the island. And the reason for that secrecy was that, shockingly, they were to be armed not with conventional explosives, but with internationally outlawed chemical warheads, capable of causing the same degree of destruction, terror and panic seen recently by President Assad’s chemical strike in Syria.
They are likely to have contained the very same nerve gas: Sarin.
--
The target of these deadly doodlebugs? The southern coast of England from Weymouth to Plymouth, where in the winter of 1943 and spring of 1944 hundreds of thousands of British and American troops were assembling and preparing for the D-Day invasion.

If the Alderney missiles had been fired — and our conclusion is that they were within a whisker of this happening — their chemical payloads would have thrown Allied invasion plans into such chaos that D-Day could not have taken place on June 6, 1944, and the whole course of World War II would have been drastically altered. The Allies would have been on the back foot and Hitler in the ascendancy. He might even have fulfilled his ambition to conquer Britain.
---
When the Channel Islands were liberated in 1945, there was a mood and a move to minimise the events of the past five years when a slice of British territory had to exist under the Nazi heel.

It was embarrassing for the British government of the day, which had made a conscious decision in 1940 not to fight for the islands, but leave the residents to their fate. It was embarrassing, too, for islanders and officials on Jersey and Guernsey who came to terms with the invaders in ways that sometimes bordered on collaboration and even treason. Uncomfortable questions were not asked. Veils were pulled over the truth, with the result that the full story of what happened on Alderney has been hidden.

Roundup of Dying wishes and burials

A seriously ill paralyzed Vietnam veteran in Texas had one final wish — to see his two best friends - Sugar and Ringo - horses that he has trained and raised for a long time. Roberto is one of the only disabled licensed horse trainers in Texas. He had been in Vietnam for just a few months before being shot and injured on May 21, 1970, which left him paralyzed. He recently went to the hospital for a wound on his back, which is when it was discovered he also needed treatment for liver problems and that his kidneys were starting to shut down.

“Horses are his life,” Rosario Gonzales told reporters of her husband, Roberto. “We’ve been training and raising horses for 30, 40 years.” ...“When the horses came up to him, he actually opened his eyes,” Rosario said. “They came up to him and I think they were actually kissing him.”

Much-loved Andy Hughes manned checkouts at the Stroud branch of Tesco ever since it opened 27 years ago. His sudden death aged 55 from respiratory failure on March 26 left colleagues in shock. But now they have discovered that Andy – who had learning difficulties – faces a simple, council funeral this Friday as his next of kin could not be located. The store’s personnel manager, Helen Skinner, said: “Andy was one of our original members and we all had an emotional attachment to him – we were his family, really. Helen said there was “nobody in the area that didn’t know him” and that he “had a heart of gold.” Staff are hoping to set up a memorial bench and rose bush in a quiet corner of the car park, and eventually scatter his ashes there.

The K9 alerted agents about a suspicious odor coming from the hearse, authorities said. During a search of the vehicle, agents discovered that a casket was filled with over 67 pounds of pot worth $33,000 worth of pot. the 67 pounds of marijuana was hidden between several bags of manure in an attempt to disguise the smell. A man, 28, a U.S. citizen, was arrested.

Medieval villagers feared the dead could return from the grave by the devil. To prevent the dead from attacking, the corpses were beheaded and chopped up. Some even had their hearts gouged out before being set on fire before burial. Researchers found the evidence in a medieval village of Wharram Percy in Yorkshire.

Researchers have discovered a Renaissance man had his heart removed after he died and buried with his beloved wife. Toussaint de Perrien, who died on 30 August 1649 had his heart put in an urn and buried with his wife - who was laid to rest 125 miles away and 7 years later...The body of his wife, Louise de Quengo, had been opened after death and her heart removed, perhaps to rest with her husband (though it has not been found). The heart-swap burials are believed to have allowed 'for couples to be reunited in death'.

After the great confessional poet John Berryman leapt from the Washington Avenue Bridge onto the icy banks of the Mississippi River (he waved at a passing car first), his wife Kate found a crumpled note in the wastebasket, written on the back of an envelope. It read simply:

May 5, 2017

Darrell Cloyd was "The angel who didn't just keep driving.'

....after her truck crashed into a tree and burst into flames. Dorothy Marko, 25 and mother of two, was able to crawl out of the back of the truck. A truck driver stopped to help and stayed with her until emergency crews arrived while others stopped to take photos and didn't help. Marko was flown to a nearby hospital, but she sadly died of her injuries.

Cloyd was not scheduled to even be driving on Highway 70 that day. He said he took a wrong turn and ended up on the highway by accident. But when he saw the truck on fire, he knew he had to help.

Her family launched a search to find the truck driver who helped and he's now been identified as Darrell Cloyd from Ohio. They hope the next time he's driving through Oklahoma they can meet him. 'I'm hoping he made her feel comfortable for those last couple moments. I'm hoping that he eased her mind a little bit so she didn't have to go alone,' her sister Linda said.

Brenda Marko, Dorothy's mother, said, 'At least he comforted her when we couldn't.' Nothing can bring her daughter back, but 'that the family is comforted by the angel who didn't just keep driving.' With all my heart I want to thank him.'

May 4, 2017

Death in the Most Rock-and-Roll Way Ever

When musician Bruce Hampton collapsed on stage Monday night, his band thought it was a theatrical end to a celebratory night and kept on playing for several minutes.....The guitarist/singer/bandleader was performing at Atlanta’s Fox Theater for his 70th birthday surrounded by over 30 of his acolytes, including members of the Allman Brothers Band, Phish, REM, Blues Traveler and Widespread Panic. They were all there because they consider Mr. Hampton a primary musical inspiration.

The sold-out show concluded with the musicians on stage smiling broadly as Mr. Hampton led them through Bobby Bland’s “Turn On Your Lovelight.” He pointed to 14-year-old Brandon Niederauer to solo on guitar and then went to one knee, collapsed and died. It was several minutes before the band stopped and EMTs rushed on stage to try and revive Mr. Hampton.

He died shortly thereafter at a nearby hospital.

“It wasn’t the first time any of us had seen him on the floor like James Brown,” says Jeff Sipe, a drummer and longtime collaborator who was conducting the musicians. “It took a minute for concern to grow.”

Fans and musicians who were present described a raucous crowd of 5,000 chanting “Bruuuuuce” throughout the night. Mr. Hampton performed a 20-minute set at the start and then joined in occasionally, mostly watching from a chair on stage. Performers ranged across generations, from the 14-year-old Niederauer, a star of Broadway’s “School of Rock,” to 88-year-old pianist Johnny Knapp, who recorded with Billie Holiday.

“Everybody was devastated,” says Mr. Haynes, himself a jam band kingpin as frontman for Gov’t Mule and formerly the Allman Brothers Band. “It was one of the most epic nights of music anyone on stage or in the audience has ever experienced. To go from honoring Bruce in this amazing way to mourning him in the blink of an eye was emotionally jarring.”....

“There was an incredible feeling in the building that it was a family reunion as much as concert,” says Widespread Panic’s John Bell. “Everyone rose to the occasion, including Bruce, who was playing and singing as well as I’ve ever seen him. He was in command until the last second and it was glorious to see. I believe he went from fully present in this world to fully present in another world, with very little in the middle.”

May 3, 2017

The Last Thing She Saw

A COMBAT photographer captured the final moment of her life on film, snapping the mortar blast that killed her.
Spc. Hilda Clayton, a visual information specialist was attached to the 4th Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division on maneouvres in Afghanistan in July 2013. The 22-year-old was documenting a live-fire training exercise in Qaraghahi to as US troops worked to certify Afghan soldiers on mortar operations. She was also training up a local combat photographer who was also snapping the scene. As the pair clicked away behind their cameras a mortar exploded while still inside its launcher.

May 1, 2017

Bog Bodies

I drove here on a damp March day with Ole Nielsen, director of the Silkeborg Museum. We tramped out to a desolate stretch of bog, trying to keep to the clumps of ocher-colored grass and avoid the clingy muck between them. A wooden post was planted to mark the spot where two brothers, Viggo and Emil Hojgaard, along with Viggo’s wife, Grethe, all from the nearby village of Tollund, struck the body of an adult man while they cut peat with their spades on May 6, 1950. The dead man wore a belt and an odd cap made of skin, but nothing else. Oh yes, there was also a plaited leather thong wrapped tightly around his neck. This is the thing that killed him. His skin was tanned a deep chestnut, and his body appeared rubbery and deflated. Otherwise, Tollund Man, as he would be called, looked pretty much like you and me, which is astonishing considering he lived some 2,300 years ago.
--
What really gets you is his lovely face with its closed eyes and lightly stubbled chin. It is disconcertingly peaceful for someone who died so violently. You’d swear he’s smiling, as if he’s been dreaming sweetly for all those centuries. “It’s like he could wake up at any moment and say, ‘Oh, where was I?’” says Nielsen, who has clearly fallen under Tollund Man’s spell himself. “Looking at his face, you feel you could take a trip back 2,300 years to meet him.
--
The best-preserved bodies were all found in raised bogs, which form in basins where poor drainage leaves the ground waterlogged and slows plant decay. Over thousands of years, layers of sphagnum moss accumulate, eventually forming a dome fed entirely by rainwater. A raised bog contains few minerals and very little oxygen, but lots of acid. Add in low Northern European temperatures, and you have a wonderful refrigerator for conserving dead humans.

Miscellaneous links

A Texas cemetery is facing backlash after posting 'Space Available' signs to advertise open plots. The bright yellow signs are scattered around the San Jacinto Cemetery in Harris County, and many believe that they are in poor taste. The signs feature the words 'Space Available' alongside the cemetery's phone number for those interested to call....

Amy Sagar, from Sydney, began working at funeral homes when she was just 17. Sitting in a classroom watching morticians work on a dead body, 16-year-old Amy Sagar knew she had found her calling. "It was just a very ordinary experience and they were just so casual. It was the first time I'd seen any form of media presenting the body as a normal thing as opposed to being spooky."

Amy, who recently married, said being exposed to death on a daily basis has taught her to not take life for granted.
"I certainly value life and the people around me a lot more. I never leave the house without kissing my husband goodbye and I never leave an argument without saying I love you."

When Jeanne Esther Barbour, 91, died on March 8, she passed on a bit of her philosophy of life with the world in her obituary: “In lieu of flowers, please be kind to someone. Call a friend or relative you haven’t reached out to recently. Visit a shut-in or nursing home resident. Forgive someone. All acts of kindness are appreciated.”

New York newscaster Michael Benny posted Barbour’s message on his Facebook page, noting, “Central New York woman’s obituary has a wonderful idea…RIP lady, wish I knew you.” Hundreds of people responded to his post, and many left comments about how her inspiring words had moved them:

Last known photograph

Philip Seymour Hoffman posed for this tintype portrait at the 2014 Sundance film festival, his final public appearance.
Soon after, Hoffman would be found dead in his apartment with 70 bags of heroin and 20 used needles.

On May 1, Remember the 100 million UPDATED

May 1, is -- as we all have heard repeatedly -- International Workers' Day.

...May 1 is also suggested as a commemorative day for another, much darker, reason. Ilya Somin has been campaigning for years to have May 1 declared Victims of Communism Day.

...Communism in the 20th century killed 100 million people, according to the Black Book of Communism. That included Jews, Kazakhs, Ukrainians in Russia, millions of Chinese under Mao, millions of Cambodians under Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge; for most of that time, western media was at best indifferent and at worst directly misleading (like Walter Duranty and the Holodomor).

As Somin says:

Our comparative neglect of communist crimes has serious costs. Victims of Communism Day can serve the dual purpose of appropriately commemorating the millions of victims, and diminishing the likelihood that such atrocities will recur. Just as Holocaust Memorial Day and other similar events help sensitize us to the dangers of racism, anti-Semitism, and radical nationalism, so Victims of Communism Day can increase awareness of the dangers of left-wing forms of totalitarianism, and government control of the economy and civil society.

It is perhaps hard to understand now, but at that time, in this place, the Marxist vision of world solidarity as translated by the Communist Party induced in the most ordinary of men and women a sense of one’s own humanity that ran deep, made life feel large; large and clarified.

---
But it was part of the NY Times "Red Century" series of articles. I'm not making this up, they actually called it 'Red I wonder why they never run articles about old Nazis getting together to reminisce about the good old days and sing the Horst Wessel song and such?